Postscript to "Part IV"

A reflection on the Anglican church, sexual abuse, and penance

“The only reason for being Christian... is because Christian convictions are true; and the only reason for participation in the church is that it is the community that pledges to form its life by that truth... I am convinced that the intelligibility and truthfulness of Christian convictions reside in their practical force.”¹

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As a postscript to:

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S. K. was an unusual philosopher in that he often turned well-accepted terms inside out to suit his particular ends. For a thinker as original and multi-faceted as the Melancholic Dane, this meant that language, necessarily unreliable and a potential tool of the enemy towards demonic ends, could be turned over and over throughout the corpus—no, a single text in order to chase down the meaning that was necessary for uncovering Christianity from underneath the tomes of self-indulgent musings on a God held at an objective distance.

At the heart of this, forever unimpressed with the idea that our words could express the fullness of life, was the earnest belief that the only response to a Christianity intent on abstracting itself away is in the active, ethical witness of the “individual of unusual learning and deep Christian character”². If life must be lived forward and Christianity is a matter of “the existential”³, then there is no scholastic proof or natural theological argument which could ever approach the value of the martyr, the one who is willingly prepared to give his life and all that comes with it in order to exist with the help of Christ.

Necessity as phenomenon

In philosophical circles, the notion of necessity is often tied to a grand statement about a possible reality—in some way or other, the case could not be otherwise. For example, “bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically necessary; for another, the laws of nature mean that it is necessarily impossible to travel faster than the speed of light; for yet another, it might be practically necessarily impossible for someone to travel from Copenhagen to Neptune within five minutes.⁴ These situations are varied and use necessity is a variety of ways. What is of interest to us, however, is Kierkegaard’s use of necessity:

“When the self in a certain degree of reflection in itself wills to be responsible for the self, it may come up against some difficulty or other in the structure of the self, in the self’s necessity. For just as no human body is perfect, so no self is perfect. This difficulty, whatever it is, makes him recoil.”⁵

Anti-Climacus, on reflecting on the condition of the human subject, notes that there is some particular aspect of the individual that the individual runs up against; there is some structure to the self, in its reliance upon something outside of its control, which they have no power over. The given possibility for almost anything, as a gift from on high that no person earns or deserves in the slightest⁶, meets its limit—you are still a creature with a beginning, that began in a certain way within a certain environment. There is a certain necessity to your life, something outside of your control that sets the contours of your existence, that reminds you that you are not the one that brought yourself into this world and you are not the ground on which your existence rests.

With that in mind, we should look at sexual abuse in the church.

The failure

The Anglican Church in the recent months has been shaken by, amongst other issues, the revealed serial abuse of John Smyth.

John Smyth QC is believed to be the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England, a long-awaited independent review found.

Smyth QC, who died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018, was accused of attacking boys at his Winchester home who he had met at a Christian summer camp in Dorset during the 1970s and 1980s.

On publication of the findings, the Archbishop of Canterbury apologised again to victims, and said Smyth's abuse had “manipulated Christian truth to justify his evil acts”.⁷

This kind of case shouldn’t be alien to Christians in the modern day. The institutions that carry the name of our saviour have been rocked by these kinds of abuse, failures, and reports. While there have been ill-advised and possibly well-intentioned attempts to offer apologia for these failings, there is another way—a way that allows for the church to present itself as the church in the necessity of its historical abuse. The believers, not tainted by the sin of sexually abusing the other, become like lambs before the face of “the world”.

For the Christian, who emerges as one who recognises the “breaking through” of Christ in the moment of unveiling, there is a necessary fact of that recognition which draws them into this environment. This is not to say that this individual is somehow complicit in the abuse that has plagued the visible Body of Christ—but they are now in a position of responsibility. Against the backdrop of a world which hides from its responsibility and, often, even flouts it in full view of “the Crowd” disabled by the impossibility of their position, the church has the possibility to be an alternative⁸—an alternative that freely admits and freely tends to the hurt and oppressed. Not because they have been caught, not because they are guilty, but because of the freedom of neighbour-love.

On the role of the church

It can be unsettling to dwell on the “demandingness” of the divine display of perfection. The individual, in the moment of recognising an ought that weighs upon them, finds that what is possible for them is expanded by the tension between both the figure of Christ, the One Who would invert each and every category of thought in order to expose Himself as Truth to us in the cold light of day, and our exposure to choice in the flow of our lives. Through the art of existing in a self-conscious, situated way, we become aware of the situations we could have “done otherwise”, to use a traditional phrase.

There is, all around us, evidence that the possible, as in what is genuinely possible for us and not merely a subsection of the possible that we find advantageous to our ends or palatable for our way of life, is far more expansive than we could possibly realise until that possibility emerges from behind the concealment of “the horizon” into the necessity of life. In this moment, my reader, the Kantian plead for mercy in the form of “can implies ought” undergoes an expansion—the can becomes greater and greater, until we might just start to do the unbelievable, might just play in the “higher madness”⁹, might just genuinely believe that with God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

And, sometimes, possibility calls us to do what is right, what we ought to do, with what is necessary—in that moment where we are not merely pulled into the chain of necessary events, like passive viewers in the flow of our lives—and that call may be altogether unpleasant, an assumption of responsibility where the world would usually hide away. In the “state of exception”, where our actions are neither merely determined nor random, we have the possibility to breathe in.

The under-determination of the church

The Church of England has been rocked by the scandal that the church itself, as certainly within the world and touched by worldliness, is filled with sinners. For anyone with even a passing familiarity with scripture, this should be no surprise: God’s self-revelation is taught through sinful men to sinful men¹⁰, therefore we should expect to find sinners amongst us. You and I, my reader, will very well almost certainly sin again and always already come to God within the state of sin—what is important is a matter of how we deal with that and how we endeavour towards forgiveness and holiness.

“Kierkegaard recognizes a spiritual hierarchy between the few who may achieve the ideal form of Christianity, and those who do not. The church then gains its responsibility in developing normal people towards this end.”¹¹

If we are charged to assist in drawing those who live in the world unto Christ (Matthew 28:16-20), then the church qua collective of individuals must present itself as capable of presenting an alternative, of presenting the expanded possibility of a different kind of life to the world, made not of the righteous and self-important but of those very sinners who sin and are conscious of their sin. This possibility, of course, is not to civilize the world, but to act in revolt against it¹². In part, this revolt will also be against the vicious failures of the faithful or would-be faithful within its own ranks as well. The church’s role, in offering confession and communion, is in a position where it can offer itself as the confessing one. The offense is invoked: from the hiddenness of the invisible church, those sheltered within the Body of Christ openly confesses its failure to a world that knows nothing of honesty.¹³

But, for the world, this is unacceptable: it breaks up the perception of their passivity, their indolent crowd-behaviour that turns child abuse into “content”, innocent suffering into “engagement”¹⁴. Aesthetically pulled from world-disturbing intercession of one instance of “the interesting” to the next, their demand for entertainment is situated below good and evil¹⁵—meaning they can only ever chatter about the possibility of the enemy’s spilled blood, unaware that their is some ought that binds us all unto one. The one who sins and the one responsible to the one who sins, in saying that they are capable of recognising that they have sinned and admit as much before the arms of the state—those monopolizers of violence—have had a chance to spill blood, is an antagonising figure of imitation to the world that knows nothing but aesthetic choices amongst choices, a “light-heartedness” and “muddle-headedness” of grounding itself within itself.

Against this self-referentiality, where the state is the sovereign above the population and justifies its status above them through its power, the church emerges as an alternative to the world—not in purity, not in sanctimoniousness, but in the simple admission of the simple equality of all humans in their humanity and the simple difference in humane selfishness of the ones who admit their failure to the world and the willing presentation of themselves to the sword in that admission. Walking in the footsteps of “the scandalous event of God-become-flesh”¹⁶, laying down in the recognition of our stumbling and our nonresistance against the world allows for the revelation of another way of living, of a humane existence grounded in the flight into the gospel that admits sin in confession and draws back together in communion.

“...a clearly-defined life-style distinct from the crowd [... yet] this lifestyle is different, not because of arbitrary rules separating the believer’s behavior from that of “normal people,” but because of the exceptionally normal quality of humanness to which the community is committed. The distinctness is not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (“secular”) involvement in the life of the world.”¹⁷

The Charge

When we are given the opportunity to believe, to actually follow Christ, it can be an unpleasant experience. There’s a comfort to the quietism that we have not earned, to the hiddenness that we wish to replicate, as it allows us to fall below the parapet and take up the defensive position. Instead of admitting failure as a collective, as individuals bound together along the path that undoes concealment via being “born again” and freely choosing to “carry and be carried”¹⁸, we may find it appropriate to offer excuses, to hold up the ideal as if it were our reality, possibly even to push aside the scandal in order to hide from responsibility. This is, of course, where the Anglican Church failed: the victims, in their abuse, became an objectivised matter that the church could not bear; Smyth, in his abusing, became a figure who haunted the visible church through his impropriety. The church remained hidden and those in its shadow were failed.

In the revelation to the world that the church is not spotless, not a pure community of self-righteousness, but as a potential faithful community of sojourners who, themselves, fail and may even abuse God’s justice, there is a possibility of a church which displays its sores to the world and admits its failure. And so, in that way, confession moves from the act of den Enkelte and becomes the collective practice of the pilgrims who fail to replicate the example that Christ left us—in recognising the neighbour qua abuser, victim, and the shaken bones of the congregation, we can start our journey towards an alternative world by turning towards our failures and opening up the sores in our midst first—the painful and difficult act of the soul breathing in before God. Only then can the church offer a particularly Christian response that offers itself as lamb to the victim, the hurt, in their victimhood and their pain—by recognising, not hiding or hiding from, what is necessary to our condition as sinners and our revealing as those responsible hurt by their exposure to our sin. And with that, and only through that, can we find that we are now able to breathe out as well.

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Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin…

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. 16 However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 And, “If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?” So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good. (1 Peter 4:1, 12-19)

1. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, p. 1, S. Hauerwas

2. “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of “Virtue Ethics””, R. C. Roberts, from Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, p. 154

3. JP V: 5100

4. Of course, as with all things, philosophers have taken to the task of necessity and modality more broadly with a sceptical lens in order to set things into disarray and create a broader ground for even more “chatter” on the topic. For a better overview by someone more qualified than myself, see “Varieties of Modality” from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

5. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 54, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

6. “For [Kierkegaard], the most important thing in life is to become a single individual–an individual who fully embraces the thisness of his existence and bases his identity on nothing other than the undeserved gift of being here” from The Passion of Possibility: Studies on Kierkegaard‘s Post-metaphysical Theology, p. v, I. U. Dalferth

7. “Church covered up ‘abhorrent’ abuse, report finds”, T. McArthur

8. Kierkegaard's Theological Sociology: Prophetic Fire for the Present Age, Kindle location 509, P. Tyson

9. “There is only one possible way of being madder than a madman: it is the higher madness of attaching oneself in all seriousness to a madman, regarding him as a wise man” from “The Inviter” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied’ It, p. 55, Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard

10. “The Bible and Christian Action,” J. Ellul, tr. L. Richmond, from Jacques Ellul and the Bible: Towards a Hermeneutic of Freedom, Kindle location 1192, ed. J. M. Rollinson

11. “Kierkegaard on the Church: Between Rejection and Redemption”, M. D. Kirkpatrick, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 70, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

12. “The Particularity of Jesus and the Time of the Kingdom: Philosophy and Theology in Yoder”, D. Barber, from Modern Theology 23:1, p. 75

13. “Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 270, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

14. I had initially intended to share a number of these types here, however I think this move would be overly antagonistic to little gain. Still, I hope that you, my reader, recognise that these explosive episodes in which the church is exposed as being also in the world is very much just another example of “content” that “the Crowd” demands.

15. “Frankfurt and Kierkegaard on BS, Wantonness, and Aestheticism: A Phenomenology of Inauthenticity”, J. Davenport, from Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, p. 90, edited by A. Rudd and J. Davenport

16. “Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 268, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

17. “The Particularity of Jesus and the Time of the Kingdom: Philosophy and Theology in Yoder”, D. Barber, from Modern Theology 23:1, p. 76

18. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 350 V. Eller